Technology news

For parents, it seems as though there’s an endless number of books out there designed to teach children the alphabet. In addition to the regular books out there, gamer parents can now introduce their offspring to Bungie’s MMORPG with a new book, D is for Destiny.D is for Destiny was originally created by Bungie for the parents who worked at the company, and the company will soon be selling the book to parents across the world. It’ll fit nicely on the bookshelf with Star Wars AB

Laurent Theron is shouting at two policemen and waving his arms around for emphasis. From a distance, he looks more like a guy arguing over a parking ticket than a man who just suffered an injury that will leave him permanently blind in his right eye.
Last Thursday (September 15th), just a few minutes before he began yelling at the cops, Theron, a 46-year-old union activist, was with thousands of others in the Place de Republique, one of the main squares in Paris. He was protesting against a con

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Facebook gaming has fallen from its peak popularity late last decade as mobile has taken over, but Sega still sees potential in the platform.
Total War Battles: Kingdom is now available on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. The strategy game has players building up castles while managing resources and engaging in skirmishes. Kingdom already debuted on PC, Mac, and mobile, but Sega is aiming to serve up something new to an audience on Facebook that are still playing aging releases like Spart

If you take a look at the recently released Elsewhere VR headset, you’ll see a slender set of Google Cardboard-style frames and an iOS app that adds 3D depth to flat images or video. If you turn your attention to the website or press release, you’ll see a "breakthrough in perception" that will "upend the augmented/virtual reality market" and provide "the watershed moment when VR goes mass-market." One of these things is a good idea. The other is everything wrong with how we talk abou

The world’s first self-driving taxi has finally found its ride-hail network. On Thursday, NuTonomy, an MIT-spinoff testing self-driving cars in Singapore, announced a partnership with Grab, the Uber of Southeast Asia. The partnership will allow NuTonomy to expand its public trial, which started several weeks before Uber launched its own public test in Pittsburgh on August 25th.Much like Uber’s self-driving test, select Grab users will get the chance to hail one of NuTonomy’s dr

Legos are great, but they'd be way more fun if they could fly around. Obviously. Flybrix is a company dedicated to getting our Legos in the air. Its "Make Your Own Drone Kit Using Lego" launched today and comes with everything you need to get your Lego drone in the air.
The basic pack comes with Legos, a flightboard, eight motor boom-arms and motors, eight propellers, a rechargeable battery, a charging cord, and a little pilot. It also comes with software so you can program your drone creation.

Apple today confirmed that it has acquired Tuplejump, a small startup that built software companies could use to store, process, query, and visualize data.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. (Hat tip to TechCrunch for breaking the news.)
Tuplejump cofounders Rohit Rai and Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu note on their LinkedIn profiles that they stopped working

Yahoo acknowledged that a data breach in late 2014 has affected at least 500 million user accounts and was likely caused by “a state-sponsored actor.” An unidentified individual or group may have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords, and potential security questions and answers. However, Yahoo denies that unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information were stolen.
As a result of this revelation, Yahoo is i

Samsung users are going to have to find a new way to listen to music: the company announced that it would be shuttering its streaming radio service Milk Music.
According to Variety, Samsung will be shutting down Milk Music on September 22nd, urging its Galaxy and Note smartphone users to switch over to Slacker Radio, which powered the system. The elimination of the service has been rumored for several months, with reports that the company was going to shutter the service because it had fail

Earlier this year we got our hands on an early version of the CoWatch, an Android-powered smartwatch that incorporated Amazon's Alexa as your personal assistant. iMCO, the company behind the CoWatch had planned to ship the device in June after its Indiegogo campaign ended, but after a delay the device is now officially available on Amazon (of course) for $279.The CoWatch wasn't the smoothest device when we had time with it back in April, but it was a pre-production version so kink

Europeans play favorites when it comes to refugees — and the ones they prefer are highly skilled, vulnerable, and not Muslim, researchers say. People across 15 countries and the political spectrum are more willing to grant asylum to seekers with these traits than others. Politicians who want to shape public opinion and persuade their constituents to accept more refugees could emphasize these factors.Researchers asked 18,000 eligible voters to look at hypothetical profiles and decide whethe

Tesla is planning to unveil a solar roof product for buildings at an event on October 28th in San Francisco, according to a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The solar roof would be the first new product to come out of the SolarCity/Tesla merger, though that transaction has yet to close.
Aiming for Oct 28 unveil in SF Bay Area of new Tesla/SolarCity solar roof with integrated Powerwall 2.0 battery and Tesla charger.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 22, 2016Musk says the solar roof will incl

A new wearable called Ōnee, advertised as "the buddy system, reinvented," is sold in pairs to sets of BFFs so that they can send distress signals to each other while at opposite ends of a party or bar. To discuss this oddly marketed product, which has a good idea at its core, we brought together some of Circuit Breaker's women.Kaitlyn Tiffany: Hi, Ashley! Quick highly personal question: have you ever been getting ready to attend a party and thought, "I hope I don't get murdered?" But you di

The United Launch Alliance is throwing shade at rival SpaceX in the wake of the company’s latest rocket failure, suggesting that ULA’s vehicles are more reliable for launching Air Force satellites. ULA is making its feelings known as it’s expected to compete with SpaceX for a contract to launch a military GPS satellite. (Those proposals were due on Monday.) ULA, which says it submitted a bid, is arguing that the military should choose the most reliable company to launch the sat

Flywheel, a Bay Area-based e-hail app company, announced Thursday that its “TaxiOS” technology was approved by New York City regulators for use in the city’s iconic yellow taxis.
Flywheel offers two main products: an e-hail app for riders, and a smartphone-based operating system for taxi drivers that replaces the jumble of meters, dispatch, advertising, navigation systems, and credit card readers currently clogging the interior of the vehicle.It’s an aggressive move by Fl

Facebook is testing a new feature on its Messenger app starting today that’ll use machine learning to prompt you to pay back your friends. It relies on a new service called "chat assist" that recognizes certain words and the actions they reference when they come up in conversation. If you type "IOU" into Messenger, for instance, chat assist will drop a link asking if you want to pay whatever amount you owe. Facebook says the service is automated and optional. Chat assist follows the launch

The tech news of the past few weeks still lingers, so this week on Ctrl-Walt-Delete Walt and Nilay tackle a few topics.
Samsung is still trying to remove all Note 7s affected with battery malfunction from circulation, but as Walt notes, some customers are going through obstacles trying return them. Walt and Nilay examine Samsung’s approach to the recall and how they may be messing it up for themselves.Also, in Walt’s column this week, he reviews watchOS 3 so the two get into Apple&rs

“Rise of Iron” is Destiny’s fourth major expansion, and it plans for the game’s future with new weapons, armor, missions, and multiplayer modes. It’s as good an excuse as “The Taken King” was to jump back into developer Bungie’s world: the loot is plentiful, the levels are easy to come by, and the sheer number of activities now available to players means the experience of upgrading your characters requires far less repetitive grind than it used to.

Life in New York City can feel artificial. I don’t mean that in the stereotypical sense — that its residents are vapid, self-interested snobs. No, for me, it’s the opposite. The city’s unease stems from its density of humanity.
On a simple walk to work, you will pass beneath hundreds of lumbering buildings full of thousands of strangers. The amount of life is so unfathomably compressed, that your brain refuses to recognize the very real fact that you share a few square mi

Anonymous hackers have compromised the private Gmail account of a low-level White House staffer, and posted the email archive publicly on the site DCLeaks. It’s the same site that published Colin Powell’s personal email archive earlier this month, as well as emails from the Democratic National Committee. A number of analysts believe the site is part of a Russian effort to influence US politics.
The emails deal largely with day-to-day logistics, but also include what appears to be an

The annual MacArthur Foundation fellows have been announced, and among them is Bill Thies, a researcher for Microsoft who works on communications programs in the developing world.
In a statement, the foundation, which awards the grants sometimes referred to as the "genius" awards, praised Thies' work on the 99DOTS program. The initiative provides a low-cost way for people in India to receive monitored treatment for tuberculosis. By making a free call after taking a dose of medication i

The term “cinematic” is overused in video game criticism to the point of cliche. The label is liberally applied when a game’s world is realistically rendered, when its storytelling has the thinnest sliver of ambition, or when the publisher hires Hollywood talent for the voice-over.
The word has been nearly robbed of its meaning, but Virginia is cinematic — truly. The adventure game, from new studio Variable State, uses the language of film to tell its story. Quick cuts. M

Google is buying up massive swaths of vertical real estate to advertise its upcoming October 4th hardware event. Billboards in the United States, building-side projections in Germany — timed to coincide with Cologne’s Photokina exhibition — and even a freaking statue have all popped up in recent days. It feels very much like the bubbling start to a high-pressure marketing campaign that’s going to boil over as Google’s announcement day approaches. This isn’t at

In yet another play for the hearts of the nation's youth, Hillary Clinton has appeared on Zach Galifianakis' web talk show Between Two Ferns. This time however, it stands to pay off for Clinton — she gets to sit mostly in silence and offer deadpan responses to Galifianakis' deadpan jokes. Even her slow blink works well with the Between Two Ferns' Charlie Rose aesthetic.
"are you excited to be the first girl president?"
At the start of the interview, Galifianakis asks her if she's excited t

There's a very good chance that you've already installed iOS 10, the latest operating system for Apple's iPhone and iPad. Apple is much better at getting devices upgraded consistently than Google is, so reviewing it is a little different than other operating systems like Android, Windows, or even macOS. When you read those reviews, the question is "Do I want to install this thing?" When you read an iOS review, the question is "What am I in for now?"
What you're in for (and what many of you are

The US Drug Enforcement Administration plans to name a new Schedule I drug: a Southeast Asian plant known for its opiate-like effects called kratom. The move may slow down medical research into a promising painkiller, or discourage it altogether.
Schedule I is the DEA’s most restrictive classification, and places kratom alongside heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and marijuana, which the agency says have no acceptable medical uses. The reason is "to avoid an imminent hazard to public safety," the agen

If you could really feel your digital money — the way you can feel the metal of a quarter or the paper of a $20 bill — would you spend it more wisely? This is the question behind Scrip, a product concept from studio NewDealDesign. As companies like Apple make financial transactions as close to invisible as possible, NDD is imagining a future where every purchase is a literally weighty decision. And to realize this dream, it’s built something sleek, science fictional, and more t